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India wakes up to AIDS: As Asia faces the prospect of an explosive epidemic of AIDS, Indian health workers are becoming increasingly alarmed at how little has yet been done to prevent the spread of HIV

2 November 1991

By OMAR SATTAUR

Most people in India have never heard of AIDS. Most of those who have
think only foreigners have it. Most of those who accept that Indians have
AIDS too, think only gay men, prostitutes and heroin mainliners are at risk.
Yet despite such misconceptions, education in India receives only 14 per
cent of funds earmarked for controlling AIDS and other sexually transmitted
diseases. Without it, AIDS will hit the poor of India hardest, just as it
has in other developing countries.

AIDS kills people at their most productive age, which is bad for any
country but much more so for developing countries. At this year’s international
AIDS conference, James Chin, of the WHO’s Global Programme on AIDS, predicted
that more than 2.5 million people in South and Southeast Asia are likely
to be infected with HIV within the next four years. Chin estimates that
by the year 2000, well over a million people will have developed AIDS worldwide,
more than one-quarter of them Asian. Finding out how many are likely to
be Indian is a priority of India’s National AIDS Control Programme.

By June, India had screened 901 468 people for HIV, of whom 5131 were
confirmed to be infected. Within the country, only 55 Indians and 13 foreigners
have so far been diagnosed as having AIDS. Taken alone, the figures are
not so worrying. What alarms Indian health workers is the potential danger
of AIDS in a country where more than a third of the population lives in
poverty, and where many more people are ignorant of the disease, its cause
and how to protect themselves. …